Forum

The State of Irish Hagiography

Dorothy Bray

McGill University

§1. For many years, modern scholars tended to regard the early
Irish Church as a strange and peculiar organization on the margins of Western
Christianity, a church whose practices and doctrines often appeared to be at
odds with orthodox beliefs. The same notion extended to Irish hagiography; the
Lives of Irish saints were perceived as peculiar, over-the-top texts, full of
credulous and bombastic miracle stories and rather bombastic saints, too—the
product of a wild native imagination from clerics practicing their own form
of Christianity. Over the past twenty-five years, this perception has changed
considerably as our understanding of the early Irish Church and so-called 'Celtic
Christianity' has developed and changed, with new research into the history,
archaeology and language of early medieval Ireland. Studies in early Irish hagiography
have flourished, with an increasing number of publications demonstrating a variety
of approaches in a variety of disciplines. Indeed, the latter half of the twentieth
century saw a burgeoning of interest in this body of texts, in both Latin and
Irish, with the work of scholars such as Ludwig Bieler, Kathleen Hughes, and
Felim Ó Briain, among others. The publication of W.W. Heist's Vitae
Sanctorum Hiberniae (Brussels, 1965) supplemented and completed the major
collections edited by Charles Plummer (Vitae Sanctorum Hiberniae, 2 vols.
(Oxford, 1910) and Bethada Náem nÉrenn, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1922)).
With these and other editions of Irish saints' Lives, made from the late nineteenth
century and into the mid-twentieth, students of Irish hagiography had readily
available to them the main primary texts in modern editions. What was needed,
however, was a suitable methodological approach—or a range of approaches
from disciplines other than philology—which would remove Irish hagiography
from the margins of hagiographical study in general. This brief survey outlines
some of the foremost publications and developments in Irish hagiographical studies
which have been made since 1980 and the directions now being taken by scholars
working in the field.

§2. In 1982, the first issue of Peritia appeared, most
of which was devoted to hagiography; this publication indicated that the study
of Irish hagiography had achieved a major momentum. In this volume, articles
by Ian Wood, Richard Sharpe, Kim McCone, Pádraig Ó Riain, Jean-Michel
Picard, Seán Connolly and Charles Doherty explored various aspects of Irish
hagiography which represented many of the main developments of the time; these
included the Lives of Irish saints on the continent and comparisons to early
continental hagiography (Wood); the question of the dating of the earliest Lives
of St Brigit and aspects of Brigidine tradition (Sharpe and McCone); the sources
used by the hagiographers (Ó Riain); the intent of the hagiographers (Picard
on Adomnán); the language of the texts (Connolly); and the use of saints'
Lives as sources of history (Doherty on economic history).

§3. The publication of Pádraig Ó Riain's Corpus Genealogiarum
Sanctorum Hiberniae (Dublin, 1985) gave hagiographers a valuable reference
tool for both the Lives and for hagiographical material in other texts. Ó
Riain, like many scholars of hagiography before him, looks to the linguistic,
historical and socio-cultural context of Irish hagiography. His work, especially
on the Life of St Finnbarr, demonstrates the advances made in these areas with
respect to early Irish hagiography; his publication of Beatha Bharra: Saint
Finnbarr of Cork, the Complete Life (London: Irish Texts Society, 1994)
includes not only the most recent editions and translations of the vernacular
and Latin Lives, but also an examination of the sources and contexts of these
Lives. Ó Riain's edition not only supersedes Plummer's, but allows scholars
to examine the ecclesiastical and political importance of Finnbarr as a saint.

§4. Ó Riain's colleague, Máire Herbert, has added to
this approach the literary aspect of the Lives. Her book, Iona, Kells and Derry:
The History and Hagiography of the Monastic Familia of Columba (Oxford,
1988) was another significant step forward in Irish hagiographical studies,
bringing together, as it did, both the history and literature of the Columban
foundations. Herbert described hagiography as an attempt to depict its subject
as an exemplar of holiness (1) in the context of the time and place the text
was composed. She argued that each Life bears 'an encoded message about the
milieu in which it was compiled and received' (2) and called for an inter-disciplinary
approach which combines the historical, linguistic, and literary aspects of
the texts.

§5. In 1991, Richard Sharpe published Medieval Irish Saints' Lives:
An Introduction to Vitae Sanctorum Hiberniae (Oxford, 1991) which offered
for the first time a comprehensive examination of the collections of early Irish
saints' Lives, the manuscript traditions and the continually vexed question
of the dating of the texts. For Sharpe, it was imperative to establish a firm
historical foundation for the Lives. As he put it, '[t]hese texts cannot be
put to any use until we are able to assign some kind of date, unless we are
to take the evasive and in some cases obviously mistaken approach of treating
the collections merely as literary monuments of the age of their latest compilers'
(7). The Lives, for him, are not only 'a significant part of Irish literature,'
they 'are also important as historical evidence' (7). But, he cautioned, 'one
must first establish how and to what end this evidence may be used' (8) by placing
their composition in context, in order to trace the development of hagiographical
composition. Sharpe's research and analyses uncovered another group of nine
or ten Lives that could be placed between the seventh and ninth centuries. According
to Sharpe, the value of these Lives, to the historian, lies in the information
they may offer on the development of the Irish Church and the social and economic
history of early medieval Ireland in their narratives, as advances in other
areas, such as early Irish law, are made (387). Sharpe also suggested that,
although Plummer may have been misguided in his attempt to find pagan elements
in the Lives, he nevertheless recognized that the Lives of the saints may yield
up insights as to the spiritual life of these hagiographers and their intended
audience, an aspect still to be fully explored (388).

§6. Studies in Irish hagiography, which had long given preference
to Patrician and Columban texts, continued to do so with the publication of
a collection of essays to commemorate the 1500th anniversary of the death of
St Patrick, Saint Patrick, AD 493-1993, ed. David Dumville, et. al. (Suffolk,
1993)—if one accepts the dating of 493. The volume explores such issues,
as well as the problems of the 'historical' St Patrick and the rise of Armagh
to supremacy in the early Irish Church. In a similar vein, a collection of essays
on St Columba appeared in 1997, edited by Cormac Bourke, Studies in the Cult
of Saint Columba (Dublin, 1997).

§7. Also in 1997, Pádraig Ó Riain and Máire Herbert,
along with John Carey, organized an international conference on hagiography
at University College Cork, to commemorate the 1400th anniversary of the death
of St Columba. The conference brought together scholars of all disciplines and
generated discussions not only of the Columban tradition and those of other
Irish saints, but also of the approaches to the discipline (linguistic, historical,
literary, and folkloristic) as well as its history from its beginnings in the
seventeenth century. The papers, eventually published in Studies in Irish Hagiography:
Saints and Scholars, edited by John Carey, Máire Herbert and Pádraig
Ó Riain (Dublin, 2001), represented a wide cross-section of current scholarship
in the field. Another conference, on Celtic hagiography, was held in 2001 at
the University of Wales, Lampeter; the papers presented there indicate to a
greater extent the new developments in Irish hagiographical studies. Several
papers from the conference and some commissioned for publication appear in Celtic
Hagiography and Saints' Cults, ed. Jane Cartwright (Cardiff, 2003). Here,
the literary aspect of hagiography takes its place alongside history, geography
and linguistics. The questions posed by hagiographers no longer hang on the
historicity of the saint, but on the perception of the subject and the manner
of his or her presentation. The spiritual import of the Lives is beginning to
get some treatment, as evidenced in the articles by Jonathan Wooding ('Fasting,
Flesh and the Body in St Brendan's Dossier'), Thomas O'Loughlin ('Reading Muirchu's
Tara-Event within its Background as a Biblical "Trial of Divinities"') and Thomas
Charles-Edwards ('The Northern Lectionary: a Source for the Codex Salmanticnesis')
which examine the use of the liturgy and scriptural associations in the texts
(O'Loughlin in particular, in recent years, has examined the liturgical and
theological aspects of Irish hagiography).

§8. The latest, major study in Irish hagiography comes from Nathalie
Stalmans, whose doctoral thesis has been published as Saints d'Irlande: Analyse
critique des sources hagiographiques (VIIe-IXe siècles) (Rennes, 2003).
Stalmans takes up where Sharpe left off, so to speak, and examines both the
historical context of seventh- to ninth-century Lives and their composition.
Stalmans methodically examines the Lives of the seventh and eighth centuries
according to three main functions for a saint's vita: the promotion of an ecclesiastical
centre, the promotion of a dynasty, and the teaching of the faithful. Her analysis
uncovers the changes and literary developments in hagiographical writing over
this period; for example, miracles in the Lives of the eighth and ninth centuries
no longer have the allegorical meanings which could be construed in Lives of
the seventh century; the saints and their cults become more localized than in
the seventh century (with the three major 'national' saints, Patrick, Brigit
and Columba); the cult of relics gains greater importance, as do the material
interests of the Irish Church. Stalmans looks to casting light on some of the
areas that Sharpe outlined for further research, not only the context of individual
Lives, but the spiritual importance of the saints and the way in which the Irish
churches and hagiographers perceived their saints and their roles.

§9. Stalmans also singles out a Life of St Brigit, the Vita
Prima (so-called for being the first of the Brigidine Lives published in
the Bollandists' Acta Sanctorum). The dating of this text continues to
attract debate—whether it is of the seventh century or not, whether it
predates Cogitosus's Vita Sanctae Brigidae. Stalmans's analysis puts
it in the eighth century, but no doubt the controversy will continue. Nevertheless,
this is just part of a thriving body of scholarship on St Brigit alone, and
on women saints in Ireland in general. Despite the lack of a large corpus of
material (only four female saints have extant Lives—Brigit, Íte, Samthann
and Mo-ninne; five, if we count the late Life of St Lasair), significant progress
has been made in our understanding of the history of women in the early Irish
Church and the composition of hagiographical works about them, through the work
of historians such as Lisa Bitel1
and Elva Johnston,2 for example.

§10. The idea that women in early Ireland possessed considerable
rights, liberties and powers (which the Church took away) gained popularity
in the late twentieth century and permeated the study of Irish women in religion,
perpetuating the search for 'pagan' roots to Irish Christianity. The more measured
studies assessed the hagiographical texts in terms of the literary images presented
and the possible perceptions to their audiences (MacCurtain 1980; Bray 1987).
The less measured studies tended to use hagiographical material in the same
way as historical documents, often indiscriminately in terms of dating, in order
to make their point 3 The
first full-length study of women in the early Irish Church appeared in 2002,
Christina Harrington's Women in a Celtic Church: Ireland 450-1150 (Oxford,
2002). Harrington made considerable use of hagiographical material to reconstruct
an historical picture, albeit from a very particular point of view. One of her
main arguments asserts that the early Irish Church was more 'woman-friendly'
than the continental churches, but the evidence is such that the argument can
go either way. Despite this, her methodology in approaching hagiographical texts
indicates a grounding in the historical approach advocated by Sharpe et al.

§11. St Brigit has attracted the most attention, largely owing
to the fact that more material exists for her than for any other female saint;
she has been seen variously as a model of Irish womanhood, a goddess in disguise,
and a feminist icon. Catherine McKenna's recent article, 'Apotheosis and Evanescence:
The Fortunes of Saint Brigit in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries' (2001),
charts these changing views of Brigit to the present. Her pagan associations
have received particular attention but there is a trend now to look beyond the
bald assumption that she is merely a euhemerized deity, and toward her construction
as a Christian saint in her extant Lives and how native (and pagan) ideas may
or may not have influenced their composition (as in the work of Johnston and McKenna4).
My own work on Brigit has fallen into a more literary mode,5
in an attempt to analyze the image of virtue created by her hagiographers, and
I have just completed a study of the composition of Cogitosus's Vita Sanctae
Brigidae, which explores his debt to continental hagiography and scripture.
My approach, a mixture of literary analysis and folklore, has begun to consider
'hagiographical motifs' in the narratives of miracles and marvelous deeds—rather
than seeking 'pagan' or 'folk' motifs6—and
what possible meaning, spiritual or otherwise, such motifs might have had to
their audience. The genesis of this was my first attempt to catalogue and categorize
the folk motifs in the major collections edited by Plummer,9
an ongoing and now expanded project which frequently overwhelms me by its sheer
size and scope (hence, progress is slow and publication is a dim and distant
goal on an ever-shifting horizon; in other words, don't hold your breath!).

§12. Máire Herbert previously surveyed the state of Irish
hagiography up to 1996,
charting the progress of scholarship and the work which still needed to be done.
Much of what she described then is still true today. There is, for example,
no modern critical edition of the early Latin Lives of St Brigit (although Seán
Connolly and Jean-Michel Picard are said to be working on one). Most of the
Irish Lives still exist in editions which are nearly a hundred years old, or
more (like that of Whitley Stokes's Lives of the Saints from the Book of
Lismore (Oxford, 1890), a work which cries out for a new edition), and most
of the Latin Lives remain untranslated. The exceptions are the early Lives of
SS Patrick, Columba and Brigit. Liam de Paor provides translations of several
documents and Lives associated with St Patrick in Saint Patrick's World:
The Christian Culture of Ireland's Apostolic Age (Dublin, 1993). Richard
Sharpe prepared a new translation of the seventh-century Life of Saint Columba
by Adomnán of Iona for Penguin Books (1995), thereby bringing the work
into the mainstream of Penguin Classics. Dorothy Africa, who has worked for
several years on Irish saints' genealogies and female Irish saints in particular,
has produced a translation of the Life of St Samthann for Medieval Hagiography:
An Anthology, edited by Thomas Head (New York, 2000: 'The Life of the Holy
Virgin Samthann,' 97-110). These translations have helped to make Irish hagiographical
texts better known; set alongside the Lives of other European saints, they demonstrate
that Irish hagiography is not a genre unto itself and that the Irish saints,
although not without certain characteristics peculiar to them, are yet constructed
as saints in the European model.

§13. Just as studies of the Irish Church have moved toward a greater
understanding of its relation to, and place within, the western Church, so has
the study of Irish hagiography moved toward consideration of the Lives in the
context of European hagiography. Instead of seeking differences, scholars now
tend to look as well for similarities in a common Christian culture. Another
major study of seventh-century Irish saints' Lives is being prepared by Clare
Stancliffe,8 whose previous
book, St Martin and His Hagiographer (Oxford, 1983) has been a valuable
source for the study of the influence of Sulpicius Severus on the composition
of Irish hagiography. Lisa Bitel is turning her attention to continental female
saints' Lives in order to compare them to the seventh-century Lives of St Brigit.
Peritia continues to make a point of publishing work on Irish hagiography,
as well as articles dealing with the hagiographical aspects of folklore, liturgy,
archaeology and literature. Although not every scholar currently working in
the field can be mentioned here, this survey points towards a thriving future
for the state of Irish hagiography, as the Irish saints and their Lives take
their rightful place among their European counterparts.

Notes

1. See, for example, Bitel, Lisa. 2002. Body of a saint, story of a goddess:
Origins of Brigidine tradition. Textual Practice 16.2:209-228; 2004. Ekphrasis
at Kildare: The imaginative architecture of a seventh-century hagiographer.
Speculum 79:605-627; 1996. Land of women: Tales of sex and gender from early
Ireland Ithaca: Cornell University Press; 1986. Women's monastic enclosures in early Ireland: A study
of female spirituality and male monastic mentalities. Journal of Medieval
History 12.1:15-36. [Back]

3. The prime example of this is Condren, Mary. 1989. The serpent
and the goddess: Women, religion and power in Celtic Ireland. San Francisco:
New Island; the work of Peter Beresford Ellis (1995. Celtic women. London: W.B. Eerdmans Pub) is a
close second. [Back]

4. See also McKenna, Catherine. 2002. Between two worlds: Saint
Brigit and pre-Christian religion in the Vita Prima. In Identifying the 'Celtic'
(CSANA Yearbook 2), edited by Joseph Falaky Nagy. Dublin: Four Courts Press. New research
continues to emerge from new scholars, as indicated by Thomas Torma's recent
doctoral dissertation, 2001. This woman alone: Approaches to the earliest Vitae of
Brigit of Kildare. Ph. D. diss, University of Edinburgh, which examines the figure of Brigit
in the context of the seventh- and eighth-century Irish Church and society.
[Back]

5. See Bray, Dorothy. 1992. Saint Brigit and the fire from heaven. Études
Celtiques 29:105-113, as well as 1985-86. Motival derivations in the Life of
St Samthann. Studia Celtica 20-21:78-86 and 1992. Secunda Brigida: Saint
Ita of Killeedy and Brigidine tradition. In Celtic languages and Celtic peoples,
edited by Cyril S. Byrne et al. Halifax, N.S.: D'Arcy McGee Chair of Irish Studies, Saint Mary's University, which take Brigit's
early Lives as possible models for these later saints' Lives. [Back]

6. An earlier article arose from my initial research into
folk motifs and hagiography; Bray, Dorothy. 1987. The image of Saint Brigit in the early Irish church.
Études Celtiques 24:209-215, tried to link the perception of Brigit
the saint to certain aspects of native Irish culture and belief. [Back]

7. 1992. A list of motifs in the Lives of the early Irish saints.
Helsinki: University of Wales Press. See also [author?]. 2003. Miracles and wonders in the composition of the Lives
of the early Irish saints. In Celtic hagiography and saints' cults, edited by Jane
Cartwright. Cardiff: [Publisher]. [Back]

8. An indication of this can be seen in her article, 1992. The
miracle stories in seventh-century Irish Saints' Lives. In The seventh century:
Change and continuity, edited by Jacques Fontaine and J.N. Hillgarth. London:
Warburg Institute, University of London. [Back]